A Stumble
by A Witness
Summary: Angel’s fired employees still care. But does Angel?...A dead “little Irishman” stumbles out of the Afterlife for a little bit to find out, and then some. please R


DISCLAIMER: ANGEL, and all contents (characters, scenes, plot and/or developments, etc.) and/or aspects of ANGEL which may appear in, have inspired or relate to this fiction are the exclusive property of Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, the WB, 20th Century Fox Television, Mutant Enemy Inc, Greenwolf Co., Kuzui Enterprises, and Sandollar Television, as well as any other parties unintentionally unnamed. NO INFRINGEMENT IS INTENDED. The author does not claim any ownership of "ANGEL" in any form and/or part. PLEASE DON'T SUE! Sarah McLachlan's song, "Fear", is part of Arista and published by Sony/ATV Songs LLC, Tyde Music (BMI) inspired my story. The author does not intend infringement upon the ownership of this song to Sarah McLachlan, Arista, Sony/ATV Songs LLC, and Tyde Music (BMI). I don't own any of this, though, so PLEASE don't sue!  
TIME FRAME/EPISODES KEPT IN MIND: Takes place after Angel fires everyone, before thoughts for a new Agency (PLS, JOSS, NOT "THE WINDHAM-PRYCE AGENCY"! ANYTHING BUT THAT!!!!!!! SOB).   
RATED: PG  
WARNING: I was bored when I did this, and it sucks. I miss Doyle so bad, and it can get old. THIS WAS SET DIRECTLY AFTER ANGEL FIRED HIS EMPLOYEES.  
SUMMARY: Angel's fired employees still care. But does Angel?...A dead "little Irishman" stumbles out of the Afterlife for a little bit to find out, and then some. please R&R  
  
A STUMBLE  
by A Witness  
  
Gunn staked the vampire, leaping over the pine box on the floor to hack at the chains with a fire ax. Around him, noises of roaring stakes and dusted vampires engulfed him as his team of vampire-fighting homeless youths staked and hacked and climbed and killed and were killed. Gunn freed one of the victims, decapitating a vampire as he freed another. He had mostly organized this bust to take his mind off being fired by / and Angel, the vampire with a soul who he could hardly understand. And sometimes, didn't even try to. At the moment, for reasons Gunn couldn't quite explain (friendship, perhaps?), he wasn't thinking about solving the puzzle that was Angelus. He was just worried. Worried because he and Wesley and ordelia had been fired. Angel was stumbling into something dangerous, and they had to watch out for him. Even if he had pushed them away.   
  
Wesley threw the dart expertly, hitting bull's eye and collecting the prize money. This was more or less his main source of income at the moment. But his heart wasn't in the game. There was, after all, a bigger reason for this becoming his annuity. Why had Angel fired them? He had played the moment over and over again in his head in his effort to understand...We're the only thing standing between you and real darkness...yadda yadda yadda...we've all been worried about you...etc...I know...You're fired. He didn't get it. His British mind was too simple to understand anything other than the fact that, some where along the line, Angel had tripped over a rock and had refused to be helped up.   
  
"Cordelia!" Cordelia turned to the director/professor.   
  
"Oh." She bit her lip. "Sorry."  
  
"That's alright," her instructor said, and it sounded as though the woman in her forties meant it. "You look tired. Maybe you should call it a day."  
  
Cordelia shook her head insistently. "No. That's all right." She found her thoughts straying to Angel and him firing her as she said, "I'll stay."   
  
The director nodded, momentary concern leaving. "Okay, then. Let's take it from the part after Cynthia excises the fish, then stumbles and drowns. That's...Line 42."  
  
Cordelia began. Her lines were read with emotions - confusion, worry, fear, hope - that made it effective and pleasing to the director.  
  
"You've got real stuff here," the director said at the end of the day, walking Cordelia out of the studio. She nodded, but, for the first time in her life, didn't pay attention to the compliment that would have been very important to her. Had she not been worrying about Angel. She had known him since he first came to L. A. and they had really bonded. Hell, they'd been through lots of stuff. How was it that now, they had lost that? And he had fired her. Fired her for God's Sake! He was kinda the last person she expected to be fired by. Or was it the first? She knew that, in some cases, she did deserve to be fired. But he had put up with her. And now....What was wrong? Something had to be.   
  
~+~+~+~+~  
  
Angel shivered in the dark as he stared out of his window into the night. There was nothing to see. His eyes were blurred uncontrollably. Not with tears, but with something else. Every light in the ancient hotel was turned off, and he sat in complete darkness, sunk into his armchair in his original room on the second floor. Quietly, he turned and saw the other man standing there, leather-jacket-clad back to him, staring at the wall.   
  
"Did everything I ever told you while I was still around go in one ear and out the other?"  
  
The familiarly distinct Dublin brogue didn't even make Angel start. Which was strange, since...well, the speaker was supposed to be dead.   
  
"No," came the monotonous reply.   
  
"Then you remember. 'People need you', yeah," Doyle turned around to make eye contact with crystal blue eyes, "but you need people." He looked haggard, definitely less jaunty than before his death, somehow paler, and thinner than before. Angel didn't know if it was just what he expected or the darkness, or perhaps the fact that he had forgotten so much about his old friend.   
  
"Interesting doctrine," was the only comment returned.   
  
The dead half-demon continued. "So what, now you're talkin' to me all detached-like? 'Interesting doctrine', he says. Have I been gone that long?" He glanced at the ensouled vampire's face. A small smile cracked Angel's features, and Doyle relaxed. "So," he continued, a little more quietly, "you wanna tell me why you fired them?" His eyes narrowed, and Angel suspected that the answer had appeared on his forehead.  
  
"I need space," he replied anyway, matter-of-factly. "Space away from good and evil. I'm tired of the loss, and the death, and the pain that seems to come out of both sides at the same time. They talk about rewards and atoning for redemption! But the PTB couldn't even give Darla a second chance at living her life until the end that she should have met eons ago....'Second chances.' Neither good nor evil are quite as strong in their natures as they think they are. And I'm tired of working for a side that is wrong. And, in the long run, evil." He paused. "I'm not turning to evil. I'm turning away from good. I'm not on anyone's side. But they are. They're rooting me down. I used to be thankful for that. Now, I just don't care. It would be unfair. They should fight their own battles. They shouldn't die fighting mine --"  
  
"But in acknowledging that it's unfair, you're sort of caring," Doyle countered quietly.  
  
Angel eyed him mock-dangerously. "You know a lot for a third grade teacher."  
  
Doyle's eyes lit up, as though smiling, a classic Irish attribute. "You'd be surprised at what I don't know."  
  
"What would that be?" Somehow, he already knew the answer.  
  
"Why this?" Doyle motioned around him. "Why knock down your wall against the darkness? Human interaction? Why drown yourself in some dark, watery Batcave without having Robin be there, ready to fish you out?" He hesitated, as if realization was dawning on him. "But you do."   
  
Angel looked up.  
  
"You know they'll always be there to save you, even though you fired them. You know it doesn't change a thing."  
  
"Unless I kill them," Angel interjected.  
  
Doyle frowned, expecting Angel to revoke himself.  
  
But he didn't.  
  
Doyle switched stance, moving from the end of the room closer to his friend. "Angel?" He said the name uneasily, as if testing wavering ground. When Angel's eyes lost contact, it was clear he wouldn't be revoking that statement. Ever.   
  
Angel finally realized the question he wanted to ask. "Doyle?" He looked up. The apparition was no longer there, and although Angel wasn't really surprised, he gazed around the room and repeated the name before closing his eyes.   
  
~+~+~+~+~  
  
The figure approached the black man on the rooftop across the Hyperion Hotel. He stumbled through a few gardening tools and fell with them to the ground in a small crash. Wallowing amidst the rake, shovels, old canisters and old planter pots as he tried not make any more racket moving the things about, Wesley watched Gunn's back.   
  
"He's asleep," Gunn told Wesley as he set down the binoculars and turned around, approaching the Englishman and helping him get up. "Good thing you're finally here. I was beginning to nod off myself." Wesley nodded, looking almost more exhausted than Gunn.   
  
Almost.  
  
"Do you think he can see us?"  
  
Gunn shook his head. "Hasn't even looked out the window." He hestitated. "He has been kinda talking to himself though. I couldn't read his lips, but it seemed like a calm conversation with himself."   
  
The tawdry, Doyle-wannabe picked up Gunn's binoculars and peered through them. "Well, at least he's asleep."   
  
Gunn rolled his eyes. "I think I said that." He headed towards the fire escape. "I'm going home. Cordy will come by and pick up the shift at about 5:00 tomorrow morning. Good night."   
  
"Yes," Wesley whispered in a voice that drifted off. He sat on the roof of the building.   
  
~+~+~+~+~  
  
"Doyle?"  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
...  
  
"What was it like for you?"  
  
...  
"Painful....like, life-flashin'-before-your-eyes, hurting-worse-than-hell painful."  
  
"Did it flash?"  
  
"No."..."It drifted."  
  
...  
"Really?"  
  
"Yeah. But I couldn't really think about that. I was always the menial, doing the menial stuff. I was never the hero."..."Not even then was the acme of my very short and very disappointing career in bravery. All I could think about was I don't wanna die, and I wish I could fall. I was afraid...but not only of death, but the thought that maybe I didn't have the strength to succeed. That maybe, I had nothing to give the world, and I would die, and I didn't wanna die because I had so much to lose, no matter how little..."..."What if it was for nothing? I could hardly hope, but hope stumbled its way through my fear, into my head and I thought...I thought that maybe, if I just pulled harder at that Goddamned plug and parted it because I tugged hard enough, it would be over and I could drop and maybe the worst of it would be a broken rib. Of course, there was also Cordy and all creatures with human blood in 'em for five miles 'round flashing in there. But it wasn't even like I was thinkin', 'Oh, hey! If I do this, I'll be conveyed ta the world as a hero.'"..."I was just a menial messenger. So I kinda figured, while you had your hand on my shoulder, this is your juncture. But it's mine too. I could be the small part, or I could be...well, I guess, a coward. Which is what I've always been."..."In a way, I guess dying right there and then was the coward's way out, too. A way to avoid worse, and be praised for not falling off the Beacon."  
  
...  
"Doyle?"  
  
..."Yeah?"  
  
"You're really belittling your death. As a hero."  
  
...  
"Probably not."  
...  
  
"Since you can't see, I'm shrugging with pensive, 'I'm right this time' look on my face."  
  
...  
"You don't have a 'I'm right this time' pensive look."  
  
Short, soft laughter stumbled through the silent dark.  
  
~+~+~+~+~  
  
Angel's eyes opened at about the same time that Cordelia walked onto the roof of the building. She found a sleeping Wesley and shook him violently, without mercy.  
  
"Sorry!" Wesley apologized with an exotically (for Wesley) unassuming tone as he yawned and opened his eyes.  
  
"You fell asleep," Cordelia admonished, but softly, grabbing the binoculars from his hands. Gazing through them she sighed with relief and sat on the edge of the roof. "Go home, Wesley."  
  
Wesley didn't utter a word of protest as he climbed down the fire escape.  
  
Cordelia, left with a strong, cool wind and a pair of binoculars, gazed through them, through the closed, but not shuttered, windows to Angel's room. She saw him sitting on his single armchair when she felt the skull-splitting pain accompanied with the usual flashes of people in need of help.   
  
Unless they were already dead, or didn't need help. Which was true, in this case.  
  
She saw Doyle, sitting there across from Angel. Cordelia's eyes opened and her mind was working well enough to process the fact that the scene she saw through the window was identical to the one in her flashing vision. Minus Doyle. Doyle stands and talks to Angel. Angel frowns and shakes his head. A hero's death and being belittling come into her mind before the visions stop. The wind, whipping at her body, disorients her for a moment. Suddenly, the pain made Cordelia feel like she had just cracked her head on the sidewalk after dropping fifty storeys. There were flashing lights when a face appeared before her saying, "No, dear, only three." The face sounded insistent, as though parrying objections. She thought she saw Doyle standing beyond that face saying some other words, but her vision had no time to focus because her world went black, in a darkness that even she couldn't stumble her way through.  
  
~+~+~+~+~  
  
Angel swept past the white double-doors of the hospital with stealth and silence. Although it was a little hard to imagine since he was dressed completely in black and lit up like a blood stain on white silk against the whiteness of the walls. He asked the woman behind a counter for Cordelia Chase's room and she pointed and said a number. He also asked if there were any other visitors. She shook her head, saying they had just left. He thanked her and walked calmly towards her room, scanning the doors for the room numbers. Her's had a glass window beside the door so he didn't have to enter it. He gazed through it with brooding face, hands dug deep in his duster pockets and eyes focused on her face.   
  
"Why did you come down here?" Doyle stood beside him, eyes also focused on a face he loved. Had loved. Still loved.  
  
"I wanted to see if I would care. If I would care as I looked at her." He hesitated. "Especially since I know that she had gotten the vision as she had been doing her shift on her watch over me."   
  
Doyle waited. The sound of monitors beeping in the intensive care unit of the hospital rang through both their minds, invading. The rhythmic tension was disturbed by Doyle. "And do you?"   
  
Angel didn't turn to look at his friend's face. He only stared at the lack of faint reflections on the glass of the window as he replied softly, but without guilt it seemed, "No."   
  
Silence. Angel didn't have to look to know Doyle was still there. It was confirmed by the half-demon speaking. He could tell he was shaking his head and tsking as he commented on what seemed to be the word which had ravaged his hope. "Don't know how to help you there, man." He shook his head and disappeared without Angel having to turn around and make sure.   
  
Angel stared through the glass a few more moments before walking slowly down the hall, past the double doors, and out of the hospital building, thoughts leaving Darla and Drusilla for the first time in days and wandering to the faces he had once felt so close to.  
  
~+~+~+~+~  
  
He needs help, Princess.  
  
Doyle?  
  
You were right. Something is wrong.  
  
Doyle....  
  
Hang on to Gunn and to Wesley, Cordy. You can help Angel together. He needs you and you need each other.... And you need Gunn.  
  
What are you saying? Are you leaving?  
  
....I've already left.  
  
~+~+~+~+~  
  
Cordelia's eyes flickered open when she felt a gentle drop fall on her cheek. She looked around for its source, her pupils dilating as they adjusted to the bright, white hospital lights. Her lips mouthed his name and she turned in slow motion, getting up to look out the hall. Nurses came to assist her, insisting very physically that she should lay down. She'd just fallen three flights, and had to rest. Meanwhile, Doyle watched from the end of the hallway, invisible to all eyes. Even then, he was almost sure that Cordelia could see him, standing there, not responding to her calls of his name, which echoed through the white halls. His heart, though not beating, was wrenched with the desire to appear to her every time she called his name. His face tear-stained, he stumbled slowly, almost blindly through the hospital fading with the darkness disappearing into light outside. Despite the tears, Doyle allowed a small, broken smile to crease his features with the knowledge that they would get through this. A stumble, after all, was not a fall.   
  
FIN 


End file.
